"Part of my pride in working for Her was earning money I could squander: on movies, candy, paddleballs, jacks, ice-cream cones."
"She began to offer me her clothes, for a price. Impressed by these worn things, which looked simply gorgeous to a little girl who had only two dresses to wear to school, I bought a few.
"I knew how to scrub floors on my knees and how to wash clothes in our zinc tub, but I had never seen a Hoover vacuum cleaner or an iron that wasn’t heated by fire. "
My shift was supposed to end at 9 p.m., but when I asked to leave, the manager, Jeff, shook his head. “Not until the work is done,” he said. “You leave a clean station.” I was angry and thought about quitting, but I scrubbed, rinsed and sanitized until after 10 that night.
A few years earlier, my mother’s then boyfriend instilled a loathing of that task by making me scrub the Teflon off a cookie sheet, believing that it was grease, while he sat on the couch and smoked cigarettes.
Jeff surprised me with an early graduation present: a trip to Boston. He paid for the hotel, the car and the plane tickets. We toured campus and visited Fenway Park and did some sightseeing around New England.